Nietzsche and the Meaning of Noir

Movies and the ‘Death of God’

Mark Conard looks at definitions and the meaning of Film Noir in this excerpt from The Philosophy of Film Noir. A Metaphilm exclusive.

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The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
was adapted from a novel by the hard-boiled writer James M. Cain. The movie
is interspersed with voice-over narration by the protagonist, Frank Chambers
(John Garfield), indicating that he is recalling events in the past. Frank
is a drifter who takes a job at a remote diner owned by an older man, Nick
(Cecil Kellaway), after getting a look at Nick’s stunning young wife,
Cora (Lana Turner). There is a strong sexual attraction between Frank and
Cora, and, after one aborted attempt, they succeed in killing Nick and making
it look like a car accident in order to be together. A suspicious D.A., however,
hounds them and finally tricks Frank into signing a statement claiming that
Cora murdered Nick. Cora beats the rap, and the lovers are bitterly estranged
for a short period. In the end (after some other twists and turns), they
come back together, knowing that they’re too much in love to be apart,
knowing that they’re fated to be together. Ironically, they have a
car accident in which Cora is killed. The D.A. prosecutes Frank for Cora’s
murder, and Frank is convicted and sentenced to death. We learn at the end
that he has been telling the story to a priest in his prison cell, awaiting
execution.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Postman displays all the distinctive conventions of film noir: the
noir look and feel, as well as a typical noir narrative, with the femme fatale,
the alienated and doomed antihero, and their scheme to do away with her husband.
It has the feeling of disorientation, pessimism, and the rejection of traditional
ideas about morality, what’s right and what’s wrong. Further, a
great many noir films were either adapted from hard-boiled novels or heavily
influenced by them. Last, it’s told in flash-back form through Frank’s
voice-over, another noir convention. Indeed, Postman is considered
to be a quintessential film noir.

But what does that mean? What exactly is film noir? Is it a genre
(like a western or a romantic comedy)? Is it a film style constituted by
the deep shadows and odd scene compositions? Is it perhaps a cycle of films
lasting through a certain period (typically identified as 1941 to 1958)?
Is noir a certain mood and tone, that of alienation and pessimism? Each of
these answers, amongst others, has been given by one theorist or another
as an explanation of just what film noir is. And, given that there is widespread
disagreement about what film noir is, there is likewise disagreement about
which films count as film noir. Clearly, Postman is a film noir,
but is Citizen Kane (1941), for example? Or, perhaps more pointedly,
are Beat the Devil (1953) or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
noir films? Like The Maltese Falcon (1941), both films star noir
legend Humphrey Bogart, and both were directed by John Huston, but whereas The
Maltese Falcon is considered to be a noir film, indeed a classic noir,
the other two movies are often not so regarded.

In this essay, I’ll give a brief history of the various attempts at
defining film noir. I’ll then discuss Nietzsche and the problem of
definition, and I’ll conclude by making a modest proposal for a new
way of looking at film noir and the problem of its definition.

Socratic Definition

Before examining the various, proposed definitions of film noir, I want
to look at one approach to the question of definition generally, namely Socrates’.
As a philosopher, Socrates’ central concern was ethics: he wanted to
know how to live his life, and he believed that the key to living well was
knowledge, specifically knowledge of the virtues. If he’s going to
be pious or just, Socrates believes, he has to know what piety and justice
are. So, in Plato’s dialogues,[1] in
order to achieve the knowledge he wants, Socrates searches for the form of
these virtues.

Plato’s theory of forms is a theory of universals and essences. A
universal is the category into which things fall. So, for example, individual,
physical chairs or desks are what philosophers call “particulars,” whereas
the category, “chair,” or “desk,” is the universal
or the species, under which those physical items are organized. Particulars
are concrete, individual things; whereas universals are abstract categories.
So, if the form is film noir, then the particulars would be the individual
films which fall into that category: Out of the Past (1947), The
Maltese Falcon, and so on.

But, more than this, the notion of the forms is the cornerstone of Plato’s
metaphysics, his theory about the nature of reality. For Plato, the continuously
changing everyday world of physical objects and events, the particulars,
which we see and hear around us is not ultimate reality; it is a pale imitation,
like a shadow on a cave wall (to use Plato’s famous analogy).[2] Ultimate
reality is not what we perceive with our five senses. Rather, it’s
what we grasp with our minds, the universals. The forms are intelligible
rather than sensible, they lie outside space, time, and causality, and they’re
eternal and unchanging. Further, the forms are the essences of the particulars:
they’re what make the individual physical objects and events what they
are. If someone wants to know what this individual thing made up of plastic,
metal, and fabric is, you mention the form: chair (or “chairness,” the
essence of any physical object of that type). The individual object comes
into existence, changes and decays, and ultimately is destroyed. The form,
on the other hand, remains the same throughout. So, even if every chair in
the world were destroyed, what it means to be a chair—that essence
and form—would still be the same, Socrates believes.[3]

So when Socrates asks for a definition, he is not asking for a dictionary
definition, which tells us the way we use a word. Rather, he wants a description
of the form. He wants to know what real, essential properties these virtues
(in his case) have. And if we can do that, articulate the form, then we’ll
know exactly what we’re talking about, and we’ll be able to identify
anything of that type.

So is there a way of identifying the “form” of film noir? Can
we pick out its essential properties and articulate that in a definition?[4]

Defining Film Noir 1: It’s a Genre

There is now a relatively long history of discussion about film noir and,
as I mentioned above, a continuing debate about what noir really is.[5] One
of the central issues in defining film noir is whether or not it constitutes
a genre. So, what’s a genre?[6] Foster
Hirsch says: “A genre . . . is determined by conventions of narrative
structure, characterization, theme, and visual design . . .” And, as
one of those who argues that film noir is indeed a genre, he says that film
noir has these elements “in abundance”:

Noir deals with criminal activity, from a variety of perspectives,
in a general mood of dislocation and bleakness which earned the style its
name. Unified by a dominant tone and sensibility, the noir canon
constitutes a distinct style of film-making; but it also conforms to genre
requirements since it operates within a set of narrative and visual conventions
. . . Noir tells its stories in a particular way, and in a particular
visual style. The repeated use of narrative and visual structures . . .
certainly qualifies noir as a genre, one that is in fact as heavily
coded as the western.[7]

So, film noir is a genre, Hirsch says, because of the consistent tone, and
story-telling and visual conventions amongst the movies. We see all of these,
for example, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, as I mentioned above:
the tone of dark cynicism and alienation; the narrative conventions like
the femme fatale and the flash-back voice-overs; and the shadowy black and
white look of the movie. These are the conventions running through the classic
noir period, Hirsch says, which define film noir as a genre.

James Damico likewise believes that noir is a film genre, and precisely
because of a certain narrative pattern. He describes this pattern as the
typical noir plot in which the main character is lured into violence, and
usually to his own destruction, by the femme fatale.[8] Again,
this is exactly the pattern of Postman: Frank is coaxed into killing
Cora’s husband and is ultimately destroyed by his choices and actions.
Damico, unlike Hirsch, however, denies that there is a consistent visual
style to the films: “I can see no conclusive evidence that anything
as cohesive and determined as a visual style exists in [film noir].”[9]

Defining Film Noir 2: It’s Not a Genre

Those who deny that film noir is a genre define it in a number of different
ways. In the earliest work on film noir (1955), for example, Raymond Borde
and Étienne Chaumeton define noir as a series or cycle of films, whose
aim is to create alienation in the viewer: “All the films of this cycle
create a similar emotional effect: that state of tension instilled in
the spectator when the psychological reference points are removed. The
aim of film noir was to create a specific alienation.”[10]

Andrew Spicer also identifies noir as a cycle of films, which “share
a similar iconography, visual style, narrative strategies, subject matter
and characterisation.”[11] This
sounds a good deal like Hirsch’s characterization of noir, but Spicer
denies that noir can be defined as a genre (or in most other ways, for that
matter), since the expression, “film noir” is “a discursive
critical construction that has evolved over time.”[12] In
other words, far from being a fixed and unchanging universal category, like
one of Plato’s forms, “film noir” is a concept which evolved
as critics and theorists wrote and talked about these movies, and is an expression
which they applied largely retroactively, to movies in a period of cinema
that had already passed.[13]

Further, in arguing against Damico’s version of noir’s essential
narrative, Spicer points out that “there are many other, quite dissimilar,
noir plots” than the one Damico describes. Classic examples might include High
Sierra (1941) and Pickup on South Street (1953), neither of
which includes a femme fatale who coaxes the protagonist to do violence against
a third man.[14] In Pickup,
for example, pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) steals classified microfilm
from a woman, Candy (Jean Peters), on the subway. She’s carrying it
for her boyfriend, who is—unbeknownst to her—passing government
secrets along to the Communists. The story, then, concerns the efforts of
the police to get McCoy to turn the film over to them—which would mean
admitting that he’s still picking pockets, thereby putting him in the
danger of becoming a three-time loser; and it concerns the efforts of the
conspirators to retrieve the film from McCoy by any means necessary, including
killing his friend and information dealer, Moe (Thelma Ritter). This is a
classic example of a film noir, but doesn’t follow Damico’s narrative
pattern.

Spicer goes on to say:

Any attempt at defining film noir solely through its ‘essential’ formal
components proves to be reductive and unsatisfactory because film noir,
as the French critics asserted from the beginning, also involves a sensibility,
a particular way of looking at the world.[15]

So, noir is not simply a certain plot line or a visual style achieved by
camera angles and unusual lighting, Spicer says. It also involves a “way
of looking at the world,” an outlook on life and human existence.

In addition to a series or cycle of movies, film noir is often identified
by, or defined as, the particular visual style, mood, tone, or set of motifs
characteristic to the form. Raymond Durgnat, for example, says that: “The film
noir is not a genre, as the western and gangster film, and takes us
into the realm of classification by motif and tone.”[16] The
tone is one of bleak cynicism, says Durgnat, and the dominant motifs include:
crime as social criticism; gangsters; private eyes and adventurers; middle
class murder; portraits and doubles; sexual pathology; psychopaths, etc.

Paul Schrader likewise denies that noir is a genre. He says: “[Film
noir] is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions
of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone
and mood.”[17] He
thus rejects Durgnat’s classification by motif, and focuses his definition
on the important element of mood, specifically that of “cynicism, pessimism
and darkness.” He goes on to say that “film noir’s
techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity;
then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style
becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness.”[18]

In a classic essay, Robert Porfirio says that “Schrader was right
in insisting upon both visual style and mood as criteria.”[19] The
mood at the heart of noir, says Porfirio, is pessimism, “which makes
the black film black for us.”[20] The “black
vision” of film noir is one of “despair, loneliness and dread,” he
claims, and “is nothing less than an existential attitude towards life
. . .”[21] This
existentialist outlook on life which infuses noir didn’t come from
the European existentialists (like Sartre and Camus), who were roughly contemporaneous
with the classic American noir period, says Porfirio. Rather, “It is
more likely that this existential bias was drawn from a source much nearer
at hand—the hard-boiled school of fiction without which quite possibly
there would have been no film noir.”[22] The
mood of pessimism, loneliness, dread and despair are to be found in the works
of, e.g., Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and David Goodis,
whose writings were a resource for and had a direct influence upon those
who created noir films in the classic period, as I mentioned above. I’ll
have more to say about Porfirio and the existentialist outlook of noir films
below.

Last, R. Barton Palmer likewise rejects the definition of noir as a genre,
calling it instead a “transgeneric phenomenon,”[23] since
it existed “through a number of related genres whose most important
common threads were a concern with criminality . . . and with social breakdown.” The
genres associated with noir include: “The crime melodrama, the detective
film, the thriller, and the woman’s picture.”[24] In
other words, whatever the noir element in a film noir is, it can be expressed
through a number of genres, melodrama, thriller, etc., and so film noir is
not itself a genre. It’s “transgeneric.”

Defining Film Noir 3: It Can’t be Defined

Another writer, J. P. Telotte, focuses his discussion of film noir’s
definition on the issue of genre, and he, perhaps prudently, somewhat sidesteps
the issue of whether or not any of these characterizations of film noir do
in fact establish it as a genre. The element of noir films that Telotte claims
unites them—without necessarily providing a basis for a calling it
a genre[25]—is
their rejection of traditional narrative (story-telling) patterns. More than
any other type of popular film, Telotte says, “film noir pushes at
the boundaries of classical narrative . . .”[26] This
classical narrative would be a straightforward story told from a third-person
omniscient point of view, which assumes the objective truth about a situation,
involves characters who are goal-oriented and whose motivations make sense,
and which has a neat closure at the end (boy gets girl, etc.). Telotte goes
on to say that “[noir] films are fundamentally about the problems of
seeing and speaking truth, about perceiving and conveying a sense of our
culture’s and our own reality . . .”[27] So
what’s common to noir films, Telotte says, is unconventional or non-classical
narrative patterns, and these patterns point to problems of truth and objectivity
and of our ability to know and understand reality. Some of the techniques
which underpin or establish these non-traditional patterns are: 1) Non-chronological
ordering of events, often achieved through flashback. As we saw, this is
the technique used in Postman, but the best example of this is perhaps The
Killers (1946), which brilliantly weaves together Jim Reardon’s
(Edmond O’Brien) investigation of Ole Andersen’s (Burt Lancaster)
death with flashbacks which tell the story leading up to the murder. 2) Complicated,
sometimes incoherent, plot lines, as in The Big Sleep (1946), for
example; and 3) Characters whose actions aren’t motivated or understandable
in any rational way. For example, why does Frank agree to go ahead with the
second (and successful) attempt on Nick’s life in Postman,
when it’s such a poor plan and sure to get them caught?

Whereas Telotte sidesteps the issue of definition, James Naremore puts his
foot down and concludes that film noir can’t be defined. “I contend
that film noir has no essential characteristics,”[28] he
says. “The fact is, every movie is transgeneric . . . Thus, no matter
what modifier we attach to a category, we can never establish clear boundaries
and uniform traits. Nor can we have a ‘right’ definition—only
a series of more or less interesting uses.”[29] Part
of the reason film noir can’t be defined, Naremore says, is that—as
mentioned above—the term is a kind of “discursive construction,” employed
by critics (each of whom has his own agenda), and is used retroactively.
The other reason has to do with the nature of concepts and definitions generally.
Most contemporary philosophers believe that we don’t form concepts
by grouping similar things together according to their essential properties—the
technique employed by Socrates and seemingly by most film theorists in talking
about noir.

Double Indemnity

Rather, says Naremore, we “create networks of relationship, using
metaphor, metonymy, and forms of imaginative association that develop over
time.”[30] In
other words, our concepts are not discrete categories, but are rather networks
of ideas in complex relationships and associations, which we form with experience.
Consequently, “categories form complex radial structures with vague
boundaries and a core of influential members at the center.”[31] This
certainly seems to describe film noir: we all agree that there is a core
set of films in the noir canon, such as Double Indemnity (1944)
and The Maltese Falcon; but there is a fuzzy boundary, such that
we disagree about a great many films and whether or not they fall into the
canon, e.g., Casablanca (1942), Citizen Kane, or King
Kong (1933).

So Naremore argues that film noir can’t be defined, that it has no
essential characteristics. On the other hand, there are those, like Nietzsche,
who would argue that this doesn’t just apply to these movies, but rather
that there’s something problematic about truth and definition generally,
even beyond the issues Naremore points out about Socratic definition. Before
I can go on to say something about what noir is, I want to examine briefly
Nietzsche’s position on these issues.

Nietzsche and the Problem of Truth and Definition

Nietzsche holds a version of what we might call a “flux metaphysics,” the
idea that the world, everything, is continually changing, and nothing is
stable and enduring. Consequently, he argues, any concept of “being”—something
which remains the same throughout change, like Plato’s forms, God,
or even the self or ego—is a fiction. Interestingly, he argues that
language is one of the primary sources of this fiction. That is, it’s
impossible to grasp and articulate a world that’s continually in motion,
in which nothing ever stays the same. Thus, “understanding” the
world and articulating that understanding becomes a matter of “seeing” parts
of the flux as somehow enduring and stable, i.e., it means falsifying what
our senses tell us.

One of these falsifications is the subject/predicate distinction that’s
built into language. For example, we say “lightning flashes,” as
if there were some thing or subject “lightning,” which somehow
performs the action of flashing. Similarly, we say “I walk,” “I
talk,” “I read,” as if there were some stable ego, self,
or subject which was somehow separate from those actions. Nietzsche says: “But
there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing,
effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to
the deed—the deed is everything.”[32] In
other words, in a world in flux, you are what you do. Further, the “doer” or
subject created by language, Nietzsche argues, is the source of the concept
of being—a stable, unchanging, permanent reality, behind the ever-flowing
flux of the world:

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness
the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk,
the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it
believes in will as the cause; it believes the ego, in the ego
as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance
upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept
of ‘thing.’ Everywhere ‘being’ is projected by
thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows
and is a derivative of, the concept of ego.[33]

The fiction begins as merely a stable self, the idea that the ego is something
enduring and unchanging and separate from its actions (as opposed to being
constituted by those actions), but soon is translated into being; that is,
for example, into Plato’s forms and a divinity. Nietzsche says: “I
am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”[34]

This falsification introduced by reason and language certainly makes truth,
objectivity, and indeed definition problematic, to say the least. In an early
and influential essay, Nietzsche says: “Truths are illusions which
we have forgotten are illusions . . .”[35] Elsewhere,
he says: “[A]ll concepts in which an entire process is semiotically
concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.”[36] Nietzsche
here seems to be agreeing with Socrates: a definition must capture the essence
of the thing, that which doesn’t change and thus has no history. The
catch here is that, as we’ve seen, Nietzsche denies that there is any
such thing, and so he’s denying that anything at all can really be
defined. This is a radical position and seems not to bode well for the project
of defining film noir. However, and perhaps ironically, I think it’s
Nietzsche who will help us better understand what noir is.

What is Noir?

To discover what makes a film a film noir, i.e., what the noir element in
the film is, it might be instructive to look briefly at noir literature,
and especially so if it’s through the hard-boiled literature that noir
films get their existential, pessimistic outlook, as Porfirio says. I’ll
take as an example of this literature a work by David Goodis,[37] who
was the author of Dark Passage, which was later made into a film
starring Bogart and Bacall. The first paragraph of Goodis’ Night
Squad reads:

At 11:20 a fairly well-dressed boozehound came staggering out of a bootleg-whiskey
joint on Fourth Street. It was a Friday night in mid-July and the humid
heat was like a wave of steaming black syrup confronting the boozehound.
He walked into it and bounced off and braced himself to make another try.
A moment later something hit him on the head and he sagged slowly and arrived
on the pavement flat on his face.[38]

We instantly recognize here the clipped, gritty phrasing of the hard-boiled
school; the dirty gutter setting; and the down-on-his-luck character. The
boozehound is being mugged by three men, while a fourth man, Corey Bradford—who
turns out to be the protagonist—watches from the other side of the
street. Bradford is a former dirty cop and forces the muggers to give him
the boozehound’s money. He keeps most of it for himself, but returns
a dollar to the boozehound for cab fare home. Instead of going home, however,
the boozehound takes the dollar—his only money—and goes back
into the bootleg-whiskey joint for another drink. Before he does, he mutters, “The
trouble is, we just can’t get together, that’s all.” Bradford
interprets this to mean, “we just can’t get together on what’s
right and what’s wrong.”[39]

The story largely takes place in a Philadelphia neighborhood called “The
Swamp,” where Bradford grew up. The area is just as run-down, dirty,
and crime-infested as its name implies. In an interior monologue about the
neighborhood, Bradford reflects on how tough the place is, and he has nothing
but good things to say about the prostitutes. They’re “performing
a necessary function,” like the sewer workers and the trash collectors.
He says:

If it wasn’t for the professionals, there’d be more suicides,
more homicides. And more of them certain cases you read about, like some
four-year-old girl getting dragged into an alley, some sixty-year-old landlady
getting hacked to pieces with an axe.[40]

If the denizens of the swamp couldn’t vent their violent and sexual
impulses with the prostitutes, they’d take them out on little girls
and old ladies. So it’s a good thing we have the pros.

Last, I’ll mention in passing that the femme fatale of this story,
Lita, is married to the gangster who runs The Swamp. When Bradford first
meets her, Goodis describes her thus: “She was of medium height, very
slender. Her hair was platinum blonde. Contrasting with her deep, dark green
eyes.” And she’s holding a book: “Corey could see the title
on the cover. He didn’t know much about philosophy but he sensed that
the book was strictly for deep thinkers. It was Nietzsche, it was Thus
Spake Zarathustra.”[41]

What we see here, and what makes this story noir, is the tone and mood,
and the sensibility, the outlook on life, that the critics and writers mentioned
above discuss. We see bleak cynicism (Durgnat), for example, in the protagonist
saving the boozehound from getting mugged, only to keep the latter’s
money for himself. We witness the loss and lack of clear priorities (Schrader)
in the same scene, and in the Bradford’s appraisal of the prostitutes.
Alienation is clearly present (Borde and Chaumeton); the whole story is one
of a man adrift, a man who has lost balance and the meaning and value of
his life. And we see existential pessimism (Porfirio). This is clearly evident
in the image of the boozhound going back into the bar to spend his last dollar
on another drink; and in the dark picture of human nature that Goodis paints
when he discusses the need for prostitutes to vent our violent urges.

One other thing, which is related to all these other elements, and which
some writers discuss, but which I want to emphasize, is what we might call
the inversion of traditional values, and the loss of the meaning of things.
That is, at the heart of the noir mood or tone of alienation, pessimism,
and cynicism is, on the one hand, the rejection or loss of clearly defined
ethical values (we can’t “get together on what’s right
and what’s wrong”)[42];
and, on the other hand, the rejection or loss of the meaning or sense of
human existence. In essence, I think Porfirio is on the right track in talking
about the noir sensibility as a kind of “existential outlook” on
life.

Further, I’m agreeing with those who say that what makes a film a
film noir is a particular mood, tone, and sensibility, an outlook on life.
This is clear because it’s that tone and sensibility which, as I said,
links the literature and the films. Thus, I think that the narrative elements
(story-telling conventions), and the filmmaking techniques (oblique camera
angles, deep focus, low-key lighting, etc.), are secondary to the mood and
sensibility. They are used to communicate that mood and sensibility,[43] but
it’s the latter which makes the film a noir.

The Death of God and the Meaning of Noir

As I mentioned, Nietzsche can help throw light on what film noir is, despite
his skepticism about truth, essences, and definition. One of Nietzsche’s
most infamous and provocative statements is that “God is dead.”[44] What
he means by this is that not only Western religions, but metaphysical systems
such as Plato’s, have become untenable. Both Platonism and Christianity,
for example, claim that there is some permanent and unchanging other-worldly
realm or substance, Plato’s forms or God and heaven, respectively.
This unchanging other-worldly something is set in opposition to the here
and now, the changing world around us (forms vs. particulars; heaven vs.
earth, etc.); and it’s the source of, or foundation for, our understanding
of human existence, our morality, our hope for the future, amongst other
things.

Again, Nietzsche says that the fiction of being is generated originally
through the falsifications involved in reason and language. This concept
of being is exposed as a fiction beginning in the modern period, Nietzsche
argues, when natural empirical science begins to replace traditional metaphysical
explanations of the world. We cease to believe in the myth of creation, for
example, and modern philosophers tend to reject Plato’s idea of other-worldly
forms. Thus, throughout the modern and into the contemporary period, religion
and philosophy—as metaphysical explanations of the world—are
supplanted by natural science. At the same time, we try to hold onto our
old understanding of human existence, our ethics, an ever-more-feeble belief
in an afterlife, etc. What finally, and gradually, dawns on us, says Nietzsche,
is that there’s no longer any foundation or justification for these
adjuncts of metaphysics, once the latter is lost. We realize more and more
the hollowness and untenability of our old outlook, our old values.

The result of this is devastating. We no longer have any sense of who and
what we are as human beings; there’s seemingly no foundation any longer
for the meaning and value of things, including ethical values, good and evil;
there’s no longer any hope for an afterlife—this life has to
be taken and endured on its own terms. Before the death of God, as good Platonists
or Christians (or Jews or Moslems), we knew who and what we were, the value
and meaning our lives had, what we had to do to live a righteous life; and
now we’re set adrift. We’re alienated, disoriented, off-balance;
the world is senseless and chaotic; and there’s no transcendent meaning
or value to human existence.

This death of God, then—the loss of permanence, a transcendent source
of value and meaning, and the resulting disorientation and nihilism—leads
to existentialism and its worldview. Porfirio characterizes existentialism
as:

an outlook which begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused
world that he cannot accept. It places its emphasis on man’s contingency
in a world where there are no transcendental values or moral absolutes,
a world devoid of any meaning but the one man himself creates.[45]

As a literary/philosophical phenomenon, set in its particular place in history,
existentialism is continental Europe’s reaction to the death of God.

My proposal, then, is that noir can also be seen as a sensibility or worldview
which results from the death of God, and thus that film noir is a type of
American artistic response to, or recognition of, this seismic shift in our
understanding of the world. This is why Porfirio is right in pointing out
the similarities between the noir sensibility and the existentialist view
of life and human existence. Though they are not exactly the same thing,
they are both reactions, however explicit and conscious, to the same realization
of the loss of value and meaning in our lives.

A (Slightly) Different Approach

Seeing noir as a response or reaction to the death of God helps explain
the commonality of the elements that thinkers have noted in noir films. For
example, it explains the inherent pessimism, alienation and disorientation
in noir. It affirms that noir is a sensibility or an outlook, as some say.
It explains the moral ambiguity in film noir, as well as the threat of nihilism
and meaninglessness that some note.

As I said, the death of God doesn’t just (or even necessarily) mean
the rejection of religion. For Americans, our belief in what Nietzsche is
calling “God,” the sense, order and meaning of our lives and
the world, is encapsulated in American idealism: the faith in God, progress,
and the indomitable American spirit. Consequently, as Palmer notes, “Film
noir . . . offers the obverse of the American dream.”[46] Most
argue that the sources of this obversion or reversal are (or include): anxiety
over the war and the postwar period; the Communist scare; the atomic age;
the influx of German immigrants to Hollywood; and the hard-boiled school
of pulp fiction. Indeed, it’s via these influences that an awareness
or a feeling came upon us, seeped into the American consciousness, that our
old ways of understanding ourselves and the world, and the values that went
along with these, were gone or untenable. We lost our orientation in the
world, the meaning and sense that our lives had, and clear-cut moral values
and boundaries.

The similarities between European existentialism and film noir are apparent,
as Porfirio points out in his essay. In the classic existentialist work, The
Stranger, for example, Camus depicts the alienation and disorientation
of a post-Nietzschean world, one without transcendent meaning or value. In
the book, the main character reacts little to his mother’s death; shoots
and kills a man for no good reason; and seems indifferent to his own trial
and impending execution.

Touch of Evil

Similarly, when Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) shrugs off his partner’s
murder, or turns his lover, Bridgid (Mary Astor), over to the police in The
Maltese Falcon; or in The Killers when Ole Andersen passively
awaits his assassins, even after being warned that they’re coming,
we get a sense of the same alienation, and lack of sense and meaning. And,
since film noir is a visual medium, these noirish elements are also conveyed
through the lighting and camera techniques. So, for example, extreme close-ups
of Hank Quinlan’s (Orson Welles) bloated face in Touch of Evil (1958),
or the tilted camera shot of Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in a hospital bed
in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), further serve to express alienation and
disorientation.

Finally, considering noir to be a response to the death of God also verifies
J. P. Telotte’s claim that noir films are “fundamentally about
the problems of seeing and speaking truth,”[47] since
it’s in a post-Nietzschean world, in the wake of the death of God,
that seeing and speaking the truth become problematic. Consequently, and
ironically, what makes truth problematic, and what makes definition impossible,
according to Nietzsche—the abandonment of essences, the resulting flux
metaphysics, rejection of anything permanent and unchanging in the universe,
i.e., the death of God—is the same thing that makes noir what it is.
That is, the death of God is both the meaning of noir, and—if we’re
to believe Nietzsche—also what makes noir impossible to define.[48]:::

Notes

1. The relationship between
Plato and Socrates is somewhat complex. Socrates never wrote anything.
He much preferred to engage people in conversation. Plato was one of Socrates’ friends
and pupils. Most of Plato’s writings are in the form of dialogues,
they’re narratives, and Socrates is very often the main character.
Consequently, when we talk about Socrates saying something, we’re
most of the time referring to one of Plato’s dialogues.

3. For a discussion of
Plato’s theory of forms see his Phaedo, 65d, or Republic,
475e – 476a.

4. There are many other
ways of thinking about definition, both ancient and contemporary. I mention
Socrates because his is a classic approach to the issue, and because he
makes a nice foil for Nietzsche.

5. I’m not pretending
that the history I’m giving is complete or that it mentions every
important work or statement on the topic. I merely want to provide the
reader with a flavor of the discussion and point out some of the definitions
provided in some of the canonical works on noir.

6. Wes D. Gehring, in
the Introduction to Handbook of American Film Genres, says a genre
in film studies “represents the division of movies into groups which
have similar subjects and/or themes.” Wes D. Gehring, “Introduction,” Handbook
of American Film Genres,” ed. by Wes D. Gehring (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1988), p. 1.

9. Ibid., p.
105. This is in contrast to those like Janey Place and Lowell Peterson,
who explicitly identify noir as a visual style (see their essay, “Some
Visual Motifs of Film Noir,” in the same volume). In Somewhere
in the Night (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), Nicholas Christopher
also argues (though less explicitly than Damico) that film noir is a genre
because of a certain narrative pattern. See p. 7 – 8.

10. Raymond Borde and Étienne
Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” trans. by Alain
Silver, in Film Noir Reader, p. 25.

13. The term “film
noir” was coined by French film critics, unbeknownst to American
filmmakers during the period of classic film noir (i.e., while they were
making these movies), and wasn’t part of the American film vocabulary
until after that classic period had ended.

14. To be fair, Damico
calls his plot description simply the “truest” or “purest” example
of film noir, and admits that there are other noir plots. However, the
sheer number and variety of the other plots would seem to undermine his
argument.

25. “This overview
of film noir’s main narrative techniques should come with
a warning: like the films themselves, this taxonomy provides but a partial,
although valuable, view of their workings, while it points toward, if it
never quite satisfactorily resolves, the question of noir’s
generic status.” J. P. Telotte, Voices in theDark: The
Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1989), p. 31.

31.Ibid.,
p. 6. Amongst others, Naremore has Ludwig Wittgenstein in mind here. In
his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that there
isn’t a set of essential properties or necessary and sufficient conditions
that link games together (how are football and tic tac toe related?); rather
there is only a loose network in which each game is connected to at least
one other by a "family resemblance.” This would seem to be the
case, too, with noir.

37. I choose Goodis
because not only is he one of my favorite hard-boiled authors, but also
because he’s much less well-known than Chandler or Thompson, e.g.,
and undeservedly so, I think.

38. David Goodis, Night
Squad (New York: First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992), p. 3.
Admittedly, Night Squad is a later work of Goodis (1961), and
so comes after the classic film noir period. However, it is still representative
of Goodis’ work and of hard-boiled pulp literature generally.

42. In film noir “Good
and evil go hand in hand to the point of being indistinguishable,” say
Borde and Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” p.
25.

43. As Porfirio says: “This
sense of meaninglessness is . . . not the result of any sort of discursive
reasoning. Rather it is an attitude which is worked out through the mise
en scène and plotting.” “No Way Out,” p.
89.

44. This is first expressed
in a passage called “The Madman,” in Nietzsche’s The
Gay Science. (See Walter Kaufmann’s translation: Vintage Books,
1974, p. 181.)

48. Many thanks to
Jason Holt, Bill Irwin, Steven Sanders, and Aeon Skoble, who gave me assistance
and excellent comments on earlier draft(s) of this essay.

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is Assistant
Professor of Philosophy at Marymount Manhattan College. He is also the author
of the novel, Dark
as Night (UglyTown, 2004) and co-editor of Woody
Allen and Philosophy and others.